Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd. Kansas City Kansas Community College’s baseball team offered its expertise to the Phillip Scimeca Wiffle Ball Tournament. With the team’s help, the tournament raised more than $10,000 for spinal cord injury recovery.

Of the 1.5 million elderly people living in nursing homes in the United States, 95 percent said they have been neglected or have witnessed someone being neglected in the facility, according to a study conducted in 2000.

Today marks the beginning of National Hospice Month, when such issues come to the fore of discussions in the eldercare community’s mind. Although many of those problems can be solved by nurses or medical practitioners, volunteers are as essential as professionals to making the patient’s overall experience a positive one.

Jonell Schenk, the director of social services and volunteer coordinator at AseraCare Hospice in Lawrence, Kan., understands how volunteers benefit the patients at AseraCare.

“If we can have a patient long enough so that a volunteer-patient relationship can be formed, that’s wonderful,” Schenk said. “The patient knows that they’re loved and cared for when they take that last breath. They know that they’re not alone, they know that someone cares about them.”

Elderly people in these facilities are more likely to have age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or other types of dementia. According to the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, 12.5 percent of patients who were admitted to hospices in 2011 suffered from dementia, excluding cancer as a cause for admittance.

These diseases can cause patients to be uncommunicative, whether it is with volunteers, physicians or family members. This type of behavior makes it more difficult for nursing facilities to recruit and maintain volunteers.

“Volunteers want interaction,” Schenk said. “It’s difficult if patients aren’t communicating. We don’t want to waste the time of a volunteer.”

To avoid volunteers feeling as if their time is not helpful to the patients, Schenk and AseraCare prioritize volunteer fulfillment at their facility.

Volunteers at AseraCare engage in activities that are similar to the interests they have outside of volunteering. The tasks that volunteers participate in include interaction with the patients through conversation, playing instruments like the piano and even painting nails or styling the patients’ hair.

Tori Bonner, a graduate student at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare, interns with AseraCare as part of her practicum. Bonner offers patients counseling services, among other activities. She said she notices how patients’ experiences can be affected through volunteerism.

“A lot of these patients don’t have a lot of family involvement,” Bonner said. “There aren’t a lot of visitors or people for them to talk to. Sometimes the aides don’t have enough time to sit down and visit with them.”

The main purpose of volunteerism in nursing homes is to provide patients with personal interaction. Schenk mentioned she knew of one patient at a Kansas facility who has been admitted for 22 years and never had one visitor. A volunteer can simply sit in a chair next to the patient to provide them with companionship.

“I feel like [volunteering] greatly improves the patient’s quality of life, by actually being able to sit down with them and talk about what they enjoy,” Bonner said. “Volunteers can run errands, do some housework, but it’s great for the patients to have someone to talk to.”

Schenk said a portion of AseraCare’s staff hours must be allocated to volunteers. They aim to offer at least 5 percent to volunteers, and sometimes they reach upward of 9 to 11 percent given to volunteers.

Providing positive experiences, both medically and socially, is what well-regarded nursing home facilities such as AseraCare strive to accomplish.

There is a multitude of locations and ways to volunteer with nursing home facilities in the Lawrence area.

For example, at Douglas County Senior Services, volunteers can help with food preparation and delivery, transportation and even clerical work like data entry.

On a serious note, Dianne Ensminger of Ballard Community Services will resign at the beginning of November after serving as CEO for 15 years. Ensminger was diagnosed with breast cancer earlier this year. Her shoes at BCS will be hard to fill.

The nonprofit Heartland Community Health Center recently began renovations on its waiting area in an effort to make patients feel more comfortable in its facility. HCHC received a grant from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment for the renovations.

The renovation process relies heavily on volunteers. Jon Stewart, whose background is in architecture, balances his usual duties as CEO of Heartland with working on the construction.

HCHC works primarily with low-income patients to provide them with healthcare, not “sick care.”

Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, and get ready for the transfer of wealth. The older generation’s money will soon be handed over to the younger, and most likely out of the local community. But wait, there’s hope! Keep 5 in Kansas is a program designed to keep that money in the community.

There’s a storm a-brewin’ in the world of welfare. Kansas Department for Children and Families rejected federal funding that would help lower-income people receive food stamps and child-care assistance. Local food bank Harvester’s alone lost out on over $14,000 of funding.

After a brief pep talk, I stepped out of my car and into the brisk, morning air last Wednesday. I walked inside the big, aluminum building that housed a horse arena. I was an hour early, but more than 50 people covered in blankets and coats were already waiting in line.

On the third Wednesday of every month, Ballard Community Services hosts a mobile food pantry at the Douglas County Fairgrounds.

Anyone can show up to the fairgrounds and receive food, which is provided by Harvester’s Community Food Network in Kansas City, Mo.

I was nervous to talk to the people waiting in line. I did not want to be disrespectful toward them by bombarding them with questions. So I kept it simple. I asked them about their experiences with the mobile food pantry.

Everyone I talked to had overwhelmingly positive opinions.

Some concerns they voiced were transporting the food back home, the inconsistency of the types of food available and the quality of the food.

One woman in line, Diane, mentioned how one month she received molded raspberries. She did say that was very rare — almost always the produce Harvester’s brings is good quality.

I was out of my element here. I was worried about people not wanting to talk to me. Once I started talking to a few people, others came to me to strike up a conversation. I talked to Diane for about an hour longer than I had intended on staying.

Through this experience I learned more about the food pantry process. I saw the direct effects instead of only hearing about them.

I felt like a part of the system and not just an outsider looking in who does not fully understand the process.